A Gallery of Martyrs
by Jude Mustard
Summary: Set in Blah, Blah, Woof, Woof. Logan does "the right thing"...
1. The Right Thing

I know this has been a long time in the making, but I hope you'll still enjoy reading it. An in-between story, set in _Blah, Blah, Woof, Woof_. A Gallery of Martyrs 

_~ The right thing ~_

The painkillers Logan had taken that morning had long since worn off, and his back and his head were bouncing waves of throbbing pain back and forth to each other. He was glad for the music that filled the silence in the car and gave him an excuse not to speak as he drove Max and Zack to his uncle's cabin.

When they reached their destination, he cut the engine and the music died away, replaced by a deafening silence. Zack wasted no time in alighting from the vehicle. Coming around to the driver's side window, he took the keys Logan handed to him. He looked from Logan to Max and back again, his mouth half opening as if he were about to spout another sarcastic witticism, then seemed to think better of it. Pursing his lips, he turned and started up the porch steps.

Zack pretended to have no EQ at all, Logan reflected as he watched him go, but he obviously knew well enough to keep his mouth shut during the drive here, and to leave him and Max alone to say their goodbyes. He realized then that the young man's ever-present cynicism was just a front to protect himself from being hurt.

Now, where had he seen that before?

He knew that Zack would look out for Max, that she'd be safe with him. A great deal safer than she'd ever be with himself, he thought, although he did his best to protect her in any way he could.

Logan remembered asking Zack right out once, knowing he was being annoying, but needing to make sure. "You'll look out for her, right?"

"It's not something anyone has to ask me to do," the young man had confirmed, somewhat irritated with him for stating the obvious.

He was a scared kid, just like the rest of them; a kid who'd been forced to grow up too soon in a hostile world. He'd taken on the additional burden of looking out for all his siblings, and seemed to think that the weight of the world rested on his shoulders, and that everything that went wrong was somehow his fault.

Logan figured he'd seen that somewhere before, too.

As Zack disappeared into the cabin, he turned his thoughts back to the woman sitting next to him. This was the moment he had been dreading ever since he'd seen the 'Wanted' poster that morning.

He knew that he had to let her go, and that knowledge tore at his heart. She would be safe once she was out of Seattle, which was what Zack had been saying all the while, what he and Max had both known and refused to acknowledge until now.

He had the bittersweet comfort, at least, of knowing that he was entrusting her to someone who loved her almost as much as he did.

His train of thought almost derailed at that point as he questioned the validity of that last one. Yes, he decided. Zack loved her. Any blind fool could see it. Logan remembered him trying to stop Max from going after Brin when their Manticore sibling had been captured, and contrasted it with the young man's reaction to Max's danger that morning. It obviously hadn't been so easy for him to write her off as just another casualty of war.

She would be safe with him, and she knew it as well as Logan did.

"You going to be okay?" he asked her anyway.

"Oh yeah, I'll be better than okay. It's the way I'm made," she replied. "It's you I'm worried about."

A new wave of pain shot up his back and knifed into his head. He prayed it didn't show in his face as he finally brought his eyes up to meet her gaze.

A part of him knew that this surgery wasn't going to be a run of the mill affair. Logan had an unsettling premonition that his life was nearing a close, and no matter how hard he tried to brush it off, he couldn't shake the feeling that Bruno's bullet may have killed him after all.

It was too late for him to tell her about it now. If he did she'd very likely ditch the whole escape attempt and insist on coming back to Seattle with him. And for what? To stay with him for a few hours, and then get taken to that Nazi death camp in Wyoming.

He looked down again, unable to look her in the eye as he whispered, "I'll miss you." 

God only knew what strange delusion seized Max at that moment, because she suddenly suggested that he go with her. Logan almost laughed at the idea.

It was a ridiculous proposal, yet every nerve and cell and synapse in him screamed _yes! Forget the surgery, forget the wheelchair, forget Eyes Only, and just follow your heart._

_The biggest threat to her safety is you._ The words that Zack had said to him weeks before suddenly reared up out of his memory and assaulted him anew.

So he gave the only logical answer to her invitation, pointing out that he would only slow her down. All the while a small voice in his head kept asking if he would have taken her up on her offer if his disability hadn't stood in the way.

He had to be honest with himself. The fact that he couldn't walk wasn't the only reason he couldn't go with her, nor even the most important one. There were even more compelling reasons for him to stay in the city. The Eyes Only network that he had spent years building up was based in Seattle, and he couldn't leave that behind. Not even for her.

He tried to infuse some lightness into the situation by echoing her words from the night before, to sound like he was making a joke. But when he told her that he had to go back because someone had to "watch out for the downtrodden," it was closer to the truth than he wanted to admit.

He looked up at her again, drinking in this last, precious sight of her. Memorizing her features, he silently said goodbye to each one. He bid farewell to her lips, her hair, her eyes. Especially her eyes. He gazed into them for an endless moment, then tore himself away. The expression in those eyes would haunt him.

It was Max who interrupted the moment. Getting out of the car, she took a few unwilling steps toward the cabin. But suddenly she stopped and turned around. Logan had one brief second to wonder what she was doing before she strode back, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.

It was goodbye, he told himself as he brought his hands up into her hair and allowed himself to forget that it was the last time this would ever happen. It was goodbye, and a million other things neither of them could say. He could hardly read the emotions that were wedged into that moment. It was their first kiss, and it would be their last. It was every kiss they might ever have shared, compressed into one. Those few seconds contained a lifetime's worth of what-ifs and could-have-beens. She gave him her soul and she took his in return.

And then she was gone.

He leaned back in his seat and watched her walk away, feeling the throbbing in his back start again. Letting her go was the right thing to do, he reasoned. He told himself a thousand different reasons why.

His hands felt as numb and heavy as his legs as he raised them to the controls of the car.  Starting the engine, he began the long and lonely drive back to the city.

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	2. A Good Thing

_~ A good thing ~_

Max stepped up to Logan's bedside after the doctor left and looked down at his still form.  It was the second time she'd seen him lying in a hospital bed this close to death. The first time she hadn't really cared what happened to him. Got involved in his business against her will somehow. She wasn't even sure what had driven her to rescue him from the second attempt on his life by the hitman. Guess he'd awakened a conscience she hadn't known she had.

This time, though, she felt helpless. She kept looking around for some bad guys to beat up, but there weren't any here. So she resorted to inwardly shaking her fist at heaven as she stood watching him.

Logan took one shallow breath, and didn't take another for a long time. Max felt a rising sense of panic as she thought he was gone, and wrestled it down, remembering that it was the effect of the morphine that the nurse had just given him. His broad chest rose slightly under the sheet then, and fell again.

She couldn't let him die like this, she thought, holding her own breath as she waited for his next one. If he stopped breathing she'd bag him herself.

No, she decided. She wouldn't let him go like this. 

Hooking up some tubing into a rudimentary transfusion set, she inserted the needle into her vein. She couldn't find anything to tourniquet her arm with, but his blood pressure was probably low enough for the blood to keep flowing in the right direction.

As she watched her blood slowly displace the saline in the tubing and flow into Logan's vein, Max found herself asking what it was about him that made him so important to her. As if in response, words that he'd said to her seemingly so long ago floated to the surface of her memories.

"You did a good thing, Max."

He was always saying that to her. To her: rogue, cat burglar and bad-assed biker chick. To her, he said that.

"You did a good thing, Max," he'd said, the time that she had rescued Maria from that creep pedophile. Max was still berating herself for having left Lucy behind all those years ago, but his words were balm to melt away the guilt from the past.

He'd said those words to her, who'd never done anything right in her life.

"It's still a good thing," he'd said when she'd wondered why she had saved Lydecker's life and thrown away her chance to be rid of her nemesis forever.

When Logan spoke those words, Max felt as though she were receiving a medal of commendation.

"Do you think we did the right thing, Logan?" she'd asked him of Zack's and her decision to let Lydecker take Brin back to Manticore.

And he again had the right words to say to take away the guilt, if not the pain.

"Do you think we did the right thing?" she would ask him, as if his were the morals that she should judge herself by. As if he were her teacher or her priest or something.

And he would look at her, his eyes piercing to her core—those eyes that represented the truth and justice that he fought for every day, those burning blue eyes boring into her soul.

Her soul. Heh. Before she met Logan, Max used to wonder if she had one.

So, he would look at her, in her, through her, almost as if he knew the effect that one word from his lips could have on her.

And then his lips would part and she would hold her breath, her heart pounding as she waited for his reply.

He would speak, his voice always gentle, barely above a whisper. Yet the words he said were like a hurricane, tearing down walls, buildings, devastating entire cities of doubt and darkness.

"You did a good thing, Max."

Because of who he was, those words were the highest praise. And because of what he was to her, she was starting to believe them.

Max looked at those lips now, lips that she had kissed only a few hours ago. They'd been pale even then, she realized, and she was an idiot for not knowing that something was wrong. They were almost white now, white and unmoving in his drawn face. She tried to calculate how much blood he'd lost and how much of her blood she could afford to give him. He'd need at least two pints, maybe three…

Heck. If she could, she'd give him all of it.

She was dead anyway. The hospital had security cameras in every corner; it wouldn't be long before someone identified her and they came and took her away. Her blood could do more good by flowing through his veins than it would ever do measured out in test tubes at some Manticore lab.

She didn't mind dying right there, if only he'd wake up and say those words again, tell her that she'd done the right thing.

Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.

If Logan woke up now he'd probably give her hell for coming back into the city and putting herself in danger, for signing her own death warrant.

But she didn't mind, if he woke up and scolded her before she died. Or before they came and took her away, which really was the same thing.

Because for once, Max didn't need Logan to tell her.

She knew she was doing a good thing.

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	3. A Far Better Thing

_~ A far better thing ~_

Zack lay on his back, catching his breath, and looked up at the vision who lay above him with his collar in her fists, daring him to subdue her. He could have overpowered Max easily, but now wasn't the right time. He knew that if he kept her there forcibly, against her will, she would never trust him again in the future.

He allowed himself another moment to drink in her flashing eyes and her floating hair, then nodded his surrender. She got up without another word and started walking back towards the city.

He watched her figure recede into the woods as he got up and brushed the soil off his clothes. Max was going back to Seattle because of one man. He tried to wrap his mind around the reason why.

There was something about this guy that drew her to him. Zack knew Max. As emotional as she was, he knew that she wouldn't throw away her life and her freedom for just any man. There had to be more to Logan Cale than meets the eye.

He knew, because he'd felt it, too. Logan didn't seem like much when he'd first met him. The guy was in a frigging wheelchair, for God's sake! Zack had brushed him off, insulted him repeatedly. But, try as he might, he couldn't make himself look down on him.

There was something about the man that commanded respect, something in his eyes that spoke of power. More power than Zack had—at least over Max. And that was a variable in the equation that disturbed him no end.

"You'll look out for her, right?" he'd actually asked Zack once, as if that was something anyone had to ask him to do.

He'd sat there in his penthouse suite, the confident and self-assured frat boy, and Zack had felt a surge of anger as he realized that Logan was the reason that Max had decided to stay in Seattle that night when they'd first found each other. It was his fault that she was in danger in the first place.

"The biggest threat to her safety is you," he'd told Logan bluntly, flinging the words at him like a gauntlet slap to his face.

He'd wondered if the other man would rise to the challenge, if he was man enough to let her go.

He had his answer now.

Zack had seen Logan swallow those painkillers that morning when he'd broken into his apartment, and he'd watched him hide his pain from Max all day. He found himself developing a grudging respect for this man who was his rival.

When he looked into Logan's eyes he saw someone who had his secrets, and he felt a part of himself connect to a part of him. Perhaps it was the part of each of them that loved her. But there was more to it than that. He could see that the other man wore the same kind of responsibility on his shoulders that Zack felt on his own. Logan was a man with a mission.

Zack didn't know what that mission was, but it was enough for Max to be willing to lay down her life for him. Max was sentimental, but she wasn't stupid. As her buddy in combat exercises, he'd had to trust her with his life as many times as she'd had to trust him with hers. Often one of them would have to make a call in the field and the other simply follow, explanations having to wait until the debriefing.

Someday Zack intended to find out what it was about Logan that Max valued so much. For now, he would just have to trust her. If she thought this guy was worth risking everything for, then Zack had no choice but to back her up.

It wasn't Logan fault that she was headed back into the lion's den now, Zack acknowledged. The other man had done his best to protect her. Now it was his turn.

Zack went back into the cabin and made sure to remove all the evidence of Max's and his having been there. He kept the cell phone Max had dropped; he would need it. Locking the door behind him, he hid the key.

He'd actually been a little surprised when Max agreed to leave Seattle with him that day. He had expected her to protest, and he'd been prepared for that. Getting her out of the city had been Plan A, which had worked up till now.

But success depends on having _more than one_ well thought-out plan that's executed with precision.

Zack used Max's stolen cell phone to make a couple of calls as he began his own journey back into Seattle. After that he erased the numbers from the phone's memory and tucked it into his jacket in case he needed to use it again before he got into the city. He would discard it before reaching the first Sector checkpoint.

It was time for plan B.

~End~

_"It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done…"_

_--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859_

Please review or email me with your comments at jude_mustard@yahoo.com.


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